Sunday, December 10, 2017

Art Miami 2017



The first week of December means two great art fairs here - Art Miami and
Art /Basel / Miami Beach.  Each has almost 300 galleries exhibiting their choicest
pieces.  So I drive down to Miami and spend two days enjoying them.
This piece is by Lino Tagliapietra, one of the greatest glassblowers in the world.





The art at Art Miami varies from the greatest realism, like this bronze statue of
"Seated Man" by Sean Henry of England, to highly abstract work.





These three works, entitled Seat Man 1, 2, and 3 are also by Sean Henry.
They also are in bronze, but these are only about 12 inches high.





A new artist for me was Jonas Wood from Los Angeles.  Large works like this one,
almost six feet high, display colorful flowers in simplified forms along with highly
illusionistic vases.  His work is very popular.





"Purple Orchids" by Jonas Wood.





This horse, by Deborah Butterfield, is made of bronze, although the original was
made of found logs and branches.  It is about four feet high.  She also makes
life-sized horses.





Here, Deborah Butterfield uses found pieces of iron to construct the horse.  Its
outline and general shape are highly naturalistic and sensitive.





"Dripping Water" by Zheng Lu is seven feet long and made of stainless steel.
It is composed of thousands of small pieces of stainless steel, made in the form of
Chinese characters which spell out famous Chinese poems.  He then welds the thousands 
of small pieces together to form the completed work, which recalls nature and
the beautiful poems which commemorate it.





This is part of the large booth for Landau Contemporary Galleries.  They also had a
gallery display of earlier works at Art Basel.  In the center is "Seated Couple" by 
the British artist Mr. Lynn Chadwick and made of stainless steel.  Around the sides
are three sculptures by the Korean artist, Chun Kwang-Young.





"Aggregation No.1" by Chun Kwang-Young is made of mulberry paper and hand-dyed
with natural vegetable dyes.  Each piece is separately made and then the pieces
are brought together.





Close-up of the green "Aggregation."  Mr. Chun's parents ran a pharmacy in China,
where customers purchased pills and powders which were given to them not in plastic,
but in small paper packets folded and tied by his parents.  He grew up watching them and
then helping them fold the little packets.  He now incorporates these small hand-made
elements in his work.





Lino Tagliapietra.  "Sumatra" hand-blown glass.  Lino works half the year in the U.S.,
teaching and blowing glass at various locations, and then half of the year in Murano-Venice, Italy.





Lino Tagliapietra.  "Spin-off."  Blown glass.  Italy.





Lino Tagliapietra.  "Verona."  Blown glass.  Italy.





Alex Katz is an American artists who combines realism and abstraction.
This is one of three beautiful "Wildflowers" on display.  This work is quite
large, almost eight feet long, and makes you feel like you are out in a meadow.





Alex Katz.  "Wildflowers."  American.  5 x 4 feet




"Smoke Flowers."  The artist uses a blow torch on special paper, and the smoke
from the blow torch scorches the paper in these luscious patterns.   3 x 3 feet each.




Michael Moebius is a German artist who takes well-known portraits of famous people
and re-imagines them as if they were chewing gum.  These are hand-painted
portraits, although he often then makes prints of the works as well.





"Audrey Bubblegum" by Michael Moebius.  German.





"Queen Bubblegum" by Michael Moebius.





Each year there are more and more artists from Asia at the fair.  Some use
traditional media like painting and sculpture, but many are also superb artists and
craftspeople in many media.  Naoki Takeyama is a Japanese artist who works in
the field of cloisonne enamels, an artistic tradition in both Europe and Asia.
Each of these pieces is a single sheet of copper which has been hammered and
fluted.  It is then decorated with ground-up glass, which is fired in a very hot kiln and
becomes vitreous, glass is formed.





Naoki Takeyama.  Cloisonne enamel vase.  About 18 inches high.





Osamu Yokoyama is one of the great bamboo artists of Japan.  In this work,
entitled "Rise," he bends, binds, weaves, and ties strands of bamboo to create
a sculpture.




"Waterlilies" by Roy Lichtenstein.  Lichtenstein was one of the Pop artists, who became
very dissatisfied with the slashing, free brushstrokes of the Abstract Expressionists.  He
wanted to return to recognizable subject matter, and even more, he thought art should
take advantage of the methods of popular advertising and imagery.  Comic books, which
are enormously popular, do not use the same printing techniques as art books - comics
are printed fast and cheap and their images are immediately understood.  In this large
work, eight feet long, printing techniques of comics are used for a variation on
Monet's famous Impressionistic "Waterlilies."




Roy Lichtenstein.  "Composition 1."  U.S.  Pop Art




Roy Lichtenstein.  "Standing Figure."  Bronze.  U.S. Pop Art.
Lichtenstein then began to create sculpture in 3 D based on his brushstrokes and
comic techniques or coloring, such as the Ben-Day dots made with a stencil.




I enjoy fiber arts.  Olga de Amaral of Bogota, Colombia, has long been one of my favorites.
"Moonbasket"  1991 is made of linen and gold leaf and is actually a mosaic made of thousands
of small pieces of linen, gilded with gold foil, and sewn together into patterns.  It looks
perhaps like the tunic of an Incan emperor.




Close-up of "Moonbasket."  Each piece of linen is about 3/4 inch high and an inch and
a half long, or so.  Patterns are created by the arrangement of the little pieces.




Also from Colombia is Fernando Botero, a very famous artist, who
now lives mostly in Paris and New York.  Although to most eyes,
his figures appear "inflated" and swollen, Botero says to him they
are perfectly normal in proportion.  This is "St. Juana of Avila
Levitating," an act for which the nun was famous.




This beautiful piece by Olga de Amaral is entitled "Caliza" and is about 3 feet square.
You can see that the pattern of linen pieces is quite different here and creates a very
different effect.  She also colors some of the linen blue, as well as gold.




Close-up of "Caliza" in linen and gold foil by Olga de Amaral.





Fernando Botero is a very prolific artist in both painting and sculpture; his style is easily
recognized.  This is "The Family" of 2017.

 Botero  (born 19 April 1932) is a Colombian figurative artist and sculptor.
 Born in Medellín, his signature style, also known as "Boterismo", depicts people
 and figures in large, exaggerated volume, which can represent political criticism
or humor, depending on the piece. He is considered the most recognized and quoted
 living artist from Latin America.




"Opera Gallery" is one of the most famous galleries.  They had a number of works by
the Spanish artist Manolo Valdes, who now works mostly in New York.  He paints and he
creates sculpture in many media.  The bronze figure in the center is one of the many
variations on the figure of he Infanta Margerita in the Velasquez painting.




Manolo Valdes.  "Infanta Margerita."  Another version, in glass.

Influenced by Velázquez, Rembrandt, Rubens, Matisse, Picasso, and others, Valdés
creates large works in which the lighting and colors express a sensation of tactility.
His work is forceful and decorated with historical art symbols. Valdés creates paintings,
 monumental sculptures, etchings, and collages.




The two stainless steel heads in the center are also by Valdes.  He often uses
the head as a starting point for elaborate and stunning "hats" or headpieces.




"Head with Wings" in bronze is by Manolo Valdes.




"Blue Head with Butterflies" is another head by Valdes.  His imagination takes many
directions with this one basic form.




One of the most unusual forms by Valdes is this alabaster head and hat entitled
"La Pamela."




In realism, the Pop artist Jeff Koons, is one of the leaders.  Some years ago, he created
a mirror-polished stainless-steel form of a "balloon dog" fifteen feet high.  He then
created it in six colors, and it was enormously popular; one has sold for $58 million.




And so he has made other variations in other sizes, colors, and materials.
This is "Red Balloon Dog" on a porcelain plate.




Helen Frankenthaler is one of the leading figures in the Abstract Expressionist / Color Field
School.  "Bending Blue."  1977.  Her works are large and are made partially by pouring
diluted pigment onto the canvas held at an angle.  The color becomes part of the fabric.
Later she would paint onto the surface, so that depths of space open up.




Bernar Venet is a French Conceptual artist who works with large bronze arcs to create
powerful forms which usually stand in fields or in front of large public building,
looking partly like wind or waves.




Damien  Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is the most prominent
 member of the group known as the Young British Artists, who dominated the art scene
 in the UK during the 1990s.  He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly the United
 Kingdom's richest living artist.  His varied practice explores the complex relationships
 between art, religion, science, life and death.

The random and infinite colour series within the ‘Pharmaceutical’ paintings (the first set
 of dots) is integral to the works. Hirst explains that, “mathematically, with the spot
paintings, I probably discovered the most fundamentally important thing in any kind
 of art. Which is the harmony of where colour can exist on its own, interacting with
other colors in a perfect format.” Any problems he had previously had with color,
 Hirst claims, were removed by the perfect arrangement of complimentary,
 yet never repeated, colors in the spots.





 Pino Manos is an Italian artist from Milan, noted for his large-scale monochromatic pieces, embellished with twisted strips of canvas and painted in rich colors. He takes a piece of
fabric, dyes it, then folds it and attaches it to a background.  He doesn't paint light or
darkness or shadow or form, but the fabric creates shadows and forms and also
mystery by form and color and light alone.



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